Does anyone in sports do any fact-checking?

Joe Morgan is full of shit. This has been clear to me for a while, but rarely has he given me so easy an opportunity to show how wrong he can be.

During the Red Sox-Athletics game I'm watching at the moment (Sox up 8-0!), Morgan just said something along these lines:

"I noticed earlier this season that Barry Bonds has been getting hit by more pitches than ever. Pitchers figure, 'Hey, I'm probably going to walk him anyway, so I may as well save a few pitches.'"

This seems like a reasonable thing to happen. Bonds does walk all the time (you don't have an on-base percentage over .600 [read that again] without walking a ton). In certain situations, everyone in the park knows that Bonds is simply not going to get a pitch to hit. So why not plunk him with a nice slow curveball?

So Morgan's making sense here. The problem is that he's wrong. Thus far this season, Barry Bonds has been hit six times. Over the course of his 19-year career, he's been hit 90 times, which averages out to 4.7 times a season. In other words, Bonds has been hit more frequently this season than over the course of his career.

But... the Barry Bonds of the late '90s and early '00s (what are we going to call this decade, anyway?) is a very different player from the Barry Bonds of the '80s and early '90s. Somewhere in the mid-'90s Barry Bonds became BARRY BONDS. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when this occurred, largely because Bonds had already won three National League MVP awards before the Leap.

For the sake of making the math easy, let's say it was 1995 (feel free to pick a different cutoff year). In the past ten seasons, Barry Bonds has been hit by a pitch 62 times, that is 6.2 times a season. As mentioned above Barry Bonds has 6 HBPs this season, right on pace with the previous nine seasons.

Joe Morgan is flat-out wrong when he says that Barry Bonds has been getting plunked more frequently this year. In the past decade, Bonds has been hit roughly six times a season, and he looks to follow suit this season. If anything, Bonds is "off his game," seeing as his HBP numbers for the past three years have been 9-9-10.

Morgan would be right to point out that, as Bonds's career has progressed, he's been hit more frequently. But that's not what Morgan said. Joe Morgan claimed that Barry Bonds has been hit more frequently than ever. And he's wrong.

This is fairly typical from Joe Morgan... his schtick basically revolves around being in baseball for years and years and therefore having more knowledge of the game than anyone else. Again, this seems reasonable. But it's just not borne out in Morgan's commentary. He consistently says things that either don't make sense, lack any support, or are obviously wrong.

Joe Morgan needs to go. Get someone in the booth who actually knows what he or she is talking about.